I remember thinking September to December last year was the busiest, craziest time of my life! Shout out to the good folk at Balranald, my home away from home. Breakfast at the bakery, lunch at Cafe Cassaro (when not in a paddock somewhere), dinner at the Golden Chain. This visit even involved a trip to the local art gallery. And stones, bones, lizards and sheep of course.

Hah! Caught you in the sunlight Lake Benanee! Enjoy some of the more beautiful photos taken by the ample supply of grey nomad photographers here. Lake Benanee was an important place and resource for Aboriginal people in the past – it was a burial ground, it was a place of conflict between Aboriginal people and Major Mitchell and Aboriginal objects from this location have made their way into collections across Australia.

The BP exhibition Indigenous Australia: enduring civilisation has been open for a few weeks, long enough, it seems, for some favourite objects to emerge. Many visitors have remarked on a 2-metre-long mask in the form of crocodile with an open mouth full of white teeth – it was made of plates of turtle shell on the island of Mabuiag in the Torres Strait, Queensland. Michael Cook’s photograph Undiscovered #4, a reimagining of early colonial encounters, is another favourite. The image positions an Aboriginal man on the shore, dressed in the red-and-white 18th-century uniform of the British military, as a tall ship sits on the horizon.